Weather delay pushes Flight 13 to Friday
SpaceX postponed the 13th Starship test flight from Thursday, July 23 to Friday, July 24, citing weather tied to Tropical Storm Bertha, which made landfall in Texas on Thursday afternoon. The company said on X that clear ground imagery of Starship's heat shield during peak dynamic pressure ascent was a key objective that would not be achievable in the storm's cloud cover, and that visibility was forecast to be ideal for a Friday attempt. The 90-minute launch window opens at 6:45pm ET (5:45pm CT) from Starbase in South Texas.
Mission profile and Starlink V3 payload
The mission will largely repeat the May Flight 12 profile, with the Super Heavy booster targeting a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of America and the Starship upper stage following a suborbital trajectory to a landing in the Indian Ocean. Flight 13 will deploy 20 production Starlink V3 satellites on a suborbital path designed to test higher-capacity broadband hardware and laser links before the satellites intentionally burn up, the first time SpaceX has flown operational satellites rather than mass simulators on Starship. Six of those satellites carry cameras to inspect Starship's heat shield from a different vantage point, supplementing the ground imagery, while new load-sensing tiles on the vehicle measure stress at higher dynamic pressure.
Engine issues and prior abort
This is the second delay for Flight 13 within two weeks. On July 16, an automated abort at T-0 stopped the countdown when four of Booster 20's 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite. SpaceX subsequently destacked the vehicle, swapped out two Raptor engines, conducted leak checks, and restacked the stack on Pad 2 Wednesday night. The company said hardware and software modifications have been made to address issues seen on the previous flight.
Strategic pivot from Falcon 9 to Starship
According to Bloomberg sources cited by The Verge, SpaceX has stopped building some Falcon 9 components and stopped accepting new rideshare reservations beyond 2028, giving the company roughly 18 months to bring Starship into operation. If Friday's attempt succeeds, Flight 13 could be the program's final suborbital test, with SpaceX already targeting an orbital flight for Flight 14.
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